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A software that automatically orders presents from eBay, gift-wraps and sends them to my friends and relatives, along with a personalized greeting card... I think that would be AI at its best. And pretty scaring indeed.

It doesn't matter what download site you use. The people that make the freeware are the ones bundling things.Yes, some download sites make it worse by bundling on top of the bundling. (Lowell Heddings, January 11, 2015)

That still doesn't clear it up. Especially with the highlighted part. That's saying the exact opposite, i.e. that the developers are the ones doing the bundling.

Precisely. Had Lowell Heddings not pointed that out in the comments, I wouldn't have realized it, since in the article itself it's not obvious if the crapware comes from the freeware programmers or from the download sites' installers.

Lowell Heddings claims (again, in the comments):

Quote

Forums are full of recommendations for software that is doing bundling.

That is exactly why we are trying to bring the problem to the attention of geeks so they will stop recommending freeware to people without doing serious research and linking to a completely safe source.... although that source might not even stay safe.

I mean SourceForge is bundling now. You can't even trust them.

Don't worry though, we will continue to illustrate the problem, which is much deeper than you want to admit.

The title of this post is exactly what freeware authors fear -- that our software will get a bad reputation because of some bad sites.

The lesson is not to beware freeware -- it's to beware these third party download sites.

This is not what the linked article is about. The author clears that up in the comments section:

It doesn't matter what download site you use. The people that make the freeware are the ones bundling things.Yes, some download sites make it worse by bundling on top of the bundling. (Lowell Heddings, January 11, 2015)

Recently I was following an interesting discussion on a German-language internet forum about YouTube search facilities which can really be lacking once in a while. The thread starter is searching for a video which is simply called 'Love' - well, just 'Love' and nothing else, and that seems to be a problem.

Google/YouTube and every mainstream search engine will not only include titles that exactly match the search term itself, but also every title that contains the search term - which is a shedload for a run-of-the-mill word like 'love' (the aforementioned thread starter gives 'Love hurts' and 'Pain in der Arsch, pocket full of cash - a grand love theme' as examples) - and there is simply no way around it. If you google around for the problem you will learn that Google's idea of 'exact match' in a title is that the search term exactly matches the title or part of the title. No filter is available that limits results to really exact title matches.

I am truly baffled how in this day and age such a glaring omission in search abilities can persist. Anyone here knows a solution?

I mean "Digital Rights Management" (DRM), i.e. copy protection. Many e-book vendors use it to protect books (although the term DRM is not restricted to e-books). There are several (incompatible) DRM schemes. Essentially, the PDF is encrypted and can only be viewed if the PDF creator allows it. To open a DRM protected PDF one needs a special PDF reader application (usually provided free of charge by the vendor that sells the DRM solution).

If you want to protect a PDF, you can try a DRM solution. DRM makes copying and/or editing a PDF somewhat harder, and some DRM implementations are even intended to prevent screenshots (so no OCR possible unless someone cracks/removes the DRM).

But I'm not sure from this thread if protecting a PDF is actually your goal.

One thing that I think hasn't been mentioned so far in this thread is that sometimes the e-books are put together in a thoughtless way. While e.g. the printed equivalent of a programming book might come with a CD-ROM that contains addional chapters (that just didn't fit in the book) one can be pretty sure that these chapters are not available in the e-book (have seen it myself in an actual programming e-book).

Personally, I find the comprehensive software reviews the most useful thing here on DonationCoder. Alas, most software reviews naturally become obsolete after just a few years, which happened to some reviews on DonationCoder as well. Certainly it would take serious effort to update them, so I don't see that happening any time soon.

I notice that nobody uses WinRK. What do you think? I heard the stability should have improved a lot compared to previous versions. Anyone tried the demo of the current version yet? On the other hand, I'm not sure WinRK is still actively developed - the newest version ist two years old now...

I currently use StuffIt on WinXP currently, but only because I found the StuffIt CD before I downloaded 7-Zip. I guess if I encounter a 7z archive I will replace StuffIt with 7-Zip - always liked the lean 7-Zip better than this bloated file manager, backup scheduler, e-mail, FTP... and *cough* compression package called StuffIt...

No, the first post actually doesn't answer "why pander to silly Winzip users?". It says there are people out there who still use it - and of course there are - but doesn't answer why not just tell them to get a decent, standard-supporting (and free!) archiver. There are lots of great options - Tugzip, IZArc, ZipGenius, etc, etc. Or if they must pay, get WinRAR, which is far more capable and whose proprietary format actually doesn't suck.

All I'm saying is don't put up with their crap - tell them it's crap and get them to switch. It's your duty as a lover of good software.

Sorry, you are right, I didn't say it as clearly as I thought. Given that most WinZip 10 users are somewhat new to computers they are really happy as soon as they manage to get along with WinZip that they are not likely to switch. Also, once they have already paid for WinZip, there's no point in arguing "try XYZ, it's even free!"In general, I feel my job is not to convert people to other tools. I just accept the world as it is. Anyway, I believe that we both don't like WinZip and we both prefer other tools, so we don't have to act as if we were arguing.

Ah, but why pander to silly Winzip users? Tell them to get a free archiver that supports .7z and they'll probably have better compression *and* not have to pay for the crappy Winzip.

- Oshyan

The reasons for that are stated in my original post. Seriously though, it seems that PPMd ZIP support will eventually get added to 7-Zip because PKWare decided to include it into their ZIP specification (along with LZMA within ZIP although it seems no archiver supports it yet ) See http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1580258&forum_id=45797 for details (Igor's comment near the end of that page).

Thanks for your answer, wr975.An SFX archive might just be the solution. So far I have resisted the temptation to do so, not so much because of the overhead (size of SFX stub) but because people seem to fear viruses in EXE files.But still it might be better to send an EXE file than to support WinZip's dirty attempt to mess with PKware's ZIP standard.

Although this format is not yet wide-spread and might never be, some people do use WinZip 10, and it would be nice to send them archives that use WinZip 10's full compression abilities. A command line program is totally suffient.